monster
by aheartmadefullmetal16
Summary: The Ishvalan war may be over, but the scars that remain will forever haunt its participants. Oneshot, Royai, pre-canon. T for slight violence.


_i'm only a man with a candle to guide me_

 _i'm taking a stand to escape what's inside me_

 _a monster, a monster_

 _i've turned into a monster_

 _a monster, a monster_

 _and it keeps getting stronger_

The air between them is frigid and uninviting, and it makes Roy shudder unnaturally. This is Ishval, and the molecules around him should be moving quickly, knocking around and making him sweat buckets. This is Ishval, and he should be burning up, just like all those people he killed. This is Ishval, and he should be dead. He wants to be dead. But instead, he is once more donning those gloves he needs and hates, and his stomach churns at the thought of what he has to do.

Over the past few months, he has seen more death and suffering than he ever bargained for, and the worst part was that it was at his own hand. The stupor he's been in is deafening and silent all at once, and the nonexistent, yet persistent buzzing in his ears places a lump of scorching iron in his throat. He sometimes wakes at night and finds himself scrubbing at his hands, and has lost count of how many times he's drawn blood. Luckily for Roy, the gloves he wears hide the rawness of the scratches his frantic fingers create.

Now those fingers are clenched tightly into fists, and he is steeling himself for what he knows he must do, for both of their sakes. Roy fights against himself to drain every drop of fear, every ounce of anguish from his body. He's determined not to feel a thing, to not experience one ounce of pain as he defaces the girl he once loved. If he let himself feel even a little, he would not be able to do it. Killing the Ishvalans had not been easy by any means, but this? This was impossible.

"Major Mustang?" Hawkeye asks, and her voice is quiet, but confident. "I'm ready."

Bile quickly rises in Roy's throat, and he turns to face her. She is kneeling with her back to him, pressing her arms tightly against her bare chest, covering it with a shirt. As he tries hard not to stare he is surprised at how loudly the tattoos scream at him, taunting him, saying _you misused these notes. You used them to kill innocent people, people who needed your help. Who are you to call yourself the Flame Alchemist? What makes you think you deserve these notes?_ As those angry red marks bait him he fights back a wave of self-loathing and mutters tightly, "Are you sure you want me to do this?"

"We've been over this," Hawkeye replies stiffly, and he sees the muscles in her back and arms tighten as she holds herself tighter. "I need you to do it. Burn all of it. Please."

The last word isn't a request, it's an order. _I really have no choice_ , he thinks, and in that moment he feels very much like a child. "All right." His voice is quiet, broken, but nevertheless yielding.

Every nerve in his body is crackling with anxiety, but he grits his teeth. The cadet in front of him places her belt in her mouth, and Roy nearly chokes on his own breath. "One." He raises his left hand. "Two." He readies his fingers. "Three."

He snaps.

The fire dances from his fingertips in a thin jet, matching the wide rays of the dying sun gleaming through the ruined window, and flares across Hawkeye's left shoulder. Her reaction is instant; a strangled scream rips from between her teeth, muffled by the thick strip of leather she holds in her mouth, but still enough to break Roy. Her back arches in agony and her lovely ivory skin bubbles and turns a furious red, redder than the ink staining her. The air shifts between them, and Roy fights back the urge to vomit. The sound of her in so much pain completely demolishes all his walls. _No, no, no,_ he thinks, and all the emotions he tried so hard to block come rushing back. His hand shakes and to his horror the flames shudder over to the right and down before he extinguishes the blaze. He gasps as the stench of burning flesh assaults his nose, and he falls to his knees. The sobs burst from him erratically, and as he rips the gloves off in desperate anguish an endless stream of begging tumbles from his mouth, almost incoherent. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please, please, _please._ I'm so sorry." He curses himself and thinks, _You couldn't do it. You couldn't free her completely from this burden. You're pathetic._

Before he knows what he's doing his arms reach out for the girl in front of him who is quickly losing consciousness. Her screaming has stopped, only to be replaced by ragged gasps, but he's no longer sure whose they are. The tears burn as they make their way down his face, and Roy gathers Riza into his arms, not caring about the military, not caring about their ranks, not caring about the years they spent apart. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Y-You didn't…" she chokes, and Roy sobs at the sound of her broken voice. "You didn't burn all of it…"

"No," he replies shortly. "No, Riza, I can't." He shudders at his unexpected use of her name; it's been so long since he allowed that sound to grace his lips. To utter it now, especially after all he had done, seemed like blasphemy. "I won't."

A long sigh slips from her, and for an awful moment he assumes the worst. But no; as her eyes drift shut his fingers find her pulse, and he cries a breath of relief. As he rocks the too-young cadet in his arms he can't bring himself to look at the damage he's caused. He knows without looking that she will forever bear scars from her request. Roy can only hope that he managed to get rid of enough of those accursed notes. He knows he would never be able to live with himself if Flame Alchemy was placed in the wrong hands.

 _The wrong hands. Are my hands the wrong ones after all?_ Roy cries internally. He had always intended to use this power he had for good, never evil, and certainly not on this scale. He should've known. He should've known that one day he would be used as a weapon for his art. He should've known the second the snapped his fingers in the State Alchemist exam that those monsters would make him kill.

A terrible thought enters his mind. _Are you really that different from them?_

At that notion he reflexively holds Hawkeye tighter, and immediately regrets it when he hears her pained squeak. Hurriedly he swipes at his eyes and remembers with a jolt about the bandages and water case he had gotten from Dr. Knox and laid out for Hawkeye. They had gone far away from the rest of the soldiers who still remained for the cleanup process. Only a few buildings remained standing on the desert sand, and none of them were without damage. The pair of them had found the sturdiest building they could find and retreated inside, only hoping they were far enough away to where the others couldn't hear Hawkeye's inevitable screams.

Hands shaking, Roy removes his white jacket, sets it on the ground, and places Hawkeye tenderly atop the dingy fabric, adjusting her so that the dirty stone does not mark her bare skin and she is not exposed. She is slipping in and out of consciousness, and every time Roy steals a look at her face, wrenched in pain, it's all he can do to keep from crying once more. His heart clenches as he soaks the bandages in lukewarm water and lays them against his cadet's skin. He fishes in the pockets of his white coat for the tube of antiseptic he had found, and locates it with a sigh of relief. Wincing in sympathy and self-hatred, Roy ever so gently ghosts his fingers across the painfully oozing burns, rubbing in the antiseptic and trying his hardest to not damage her skin more than he already has. Hawkeye remains silent, still wavering between wakefulness and sleep, and Roy simply takes care of her, taping on the bandages and binding them around her as best as he could without intruding upon her modesty. Before the war, the two had been close, but not _that_ close. He's quite sure Berthold would have personally murdered him if anything of that magnitude had happened between Roy and Riza.

The memory of how things had once been seizes Roy's heart and twists it into knots. It was his own fault that things between them had fallen apart; the academy had kept him extremely busy and so he had let their exchange of letters take a backseat in his mind. Those difficulties had only increased once he became the Flame Alchemist. After Roy had been placed in Ishval, he felt- no, he _knew_ \- he did not deserve the love and affection from someone so kind and pure after doing such terrible things to people whose names he didn't even know. If the souls of those he had killed stained his skin, he would be completely covered from head to toe. Filthy as he was, how could he ever redeem himself in the eyes of those he loved? Roy didn't know how Hawkeye could stand being in the same room as him.

"Sir?"

Hawkeye's sudden voice startles him out of his memories. "Yes?" he replies, his voice croaky. He clears his throat in a moment of self-consciousness and leans closer to the weak cadet.

"Thank you," she mutters, voice tight from the pain. A dull shock permeates through Roy's body and he shivers.

"Why are you thanking me?" he asks, his voice hitching at the end. "I don't deserve your gratitude by any means."

"Don't devalue what you've just done for me, sir," she scolds weakly, "what you've done for _us._ "

The simple indication of the word "us" makes a chill run down Roy's spine. In that simple word she had managed to focus all of her pain, all the betrayal, all of the sadness she felt at the memory of what they once had, and Roy feels every bit of it. He knows instinctively that they will never have what they had before, and it breaks his heart.

But, then again, does he even have a heart anymore?


End file.
